Sunday, January 18, 2009

"I went to your blog this morning," John said as I was about to leave for church, "expecting to read that you were about to be terribly busy and wouldn't be blogging much." Obviously, what he saw instead was last night's entry about all the time I put in yesterday on the two web sites. Why didn't I write about how busy I was about to be? Simple. I've been so busy that I hadn't gotten around to this entry yet. If you're keeping track, this is my Saturday night entry, being posted on Sunday afternoon.

Last night, as I went through those pages about Father Smith's pilgrimage over and over, fixing old links and unhelpful font sizes and adding links to the new page I built, four things happened.

One, I put in a little time trying to reassure and motivate a friend, something I was happy to do - and I hope it helped a little.

Two, during a break, I refreshed a page tracking a package from Amazon on the USPS web site. It said the package had been delivered! What? I'd been outside earlier, taking the dogs to the park and later going off to buy groceries, and there were no boxes by the front door. But on getting this notice, I got my shoes on and went outside. Both of my boxes from Amazon were in our mailbox, which was a neat trick. The larger of the two boxes was nine inches with, and so is our mailbox! It took quite a bit of work to extricate the box; it was really wedged in there.

So now I've got the Series Four soundtrack from Doctor Who, finally, which I'll probably be playing on a continuous loop for a while, judging from the previous two soundtracks. I also received The Joys of Love by Madeleine L'Engle, an early, rejected novel of hers, published posthumously. Much as I love L'Engle's fiction, her early books have an odd writing style I've always found a little offputting. It's too soon to say whether this book has that same style, exactly, but it's clearly not her best work. The back cover excerpt is awkwardly romantic: "Elizabeth's heart winged with happiness as it always did when Kurt spoke to her in that gentle, loving way." If that sentence is typical of the book, I don't blame the publisher for saying no to it. Still, "new" L'Engle fiction, more than a year after her death, is to be treasured.

The other book that arrived is The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years After, the third novel by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevemer about those letter writing cousins, Cecy and Kate, which I've wanted rather badly since reading the second volume back in September. Think of Jane Austin, only funnier and with magic, and you've got a fair idea what these books are like. So far I've read one and a half letters at the beginning of the book, and there I must stop for now. Because...

Three, two emails arrived from my CPA review course folks at 11 PM last night. Today, Sunday January 18th, is the official start of the 41-day FAR (Financial Accounting and Reporting) seminar I signed up for 11 days ago. I had worked ahead since then, completing two FAR lessons and six AUD (Auditing) ones. Now I much set the AUD ones aside, because I've got fifteen FAR lessons due by Tuesday! Subtracking the two I've done, that 13 in two days! (Man, that's worse than I remembered it being when I first looked at the assignment last night.) It says three days, but it also says the work will be graded on Tuesday, so I figure I need to be done by 9 AM MST Tuesday, since these folks are also based in AZ.

Well, I can do it. The lessons so far have only been hard insofar as there's a bit of rote memorization of terms here and there, and a lot of reasoning out what the question is asking, which numbers are irrelevant, and whether certain numbers need to be added or subtracted. The assignment turns out to be doing exactly what I've been doing so far anyway: read the text, do two kinds of tests in study mode in order to learn the material and reason things through, and then take the tests again, with the questions in a different order, in test mode. The second test is mostly past CPA exam questions. Study mode usually explains why an answer is right or wrong, which helps a lot. Test mode replicates the environment of the actual CPA exams, which also helps a lot.

Bottom line for now: expect short entries of mostly photos for a next coulple of days. You don;t mind, do you? 'Cause that's the way it's got to be. I don't (completely) skip a day no matter what, but clearly I've got to give priority to the CPA stuff.

Oh, and the fourth thing that happened last night? That was my computer slowing down and nearly crashing under the burden of all those Firefox and SeaMonkey and MS Word and PhotoStudio and Windows windows. I did a reboot and backup this morning before going to bed, and will try to keep the number of open apps down today.

About Me

Author of magazine articles, trading cards, and the Mâvarin novels. Intermittently seeking an agent and a publisher. Accountant, church webmaster, ex-fanzine editor. Married since 1979, one husband, no kids, two dogs, no cats.
Email is mavarin2 at gmail.com. Home is Casa Blocher, better known as The Museum of the Weird. Welcome!

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